Gardenweb.com reviews

Pros:
* Pretty fast and functional on a desktop or laptop.
* You can edit the sidebar on the main gardenweb.com page to make the site easier to navigate. (Please do it as often as desired.)
* There is a wide variety of forums.
* It has a decently large user-base.
* It's been around for a long time.
* They currently allow a lot more slack to the users than before Houzz bought them out. A lot of things were once forbidden that no longer are.
* There's a mobile app for Houzz.
* The registration process is fairly fast.
* Although it requires some enabling, you actually can PM users.
* Email notifications for stuff you post works about as expected.
* You can sort of tag people in posts.
* Posts are indexed by Google.
* The data is public (you don't have to be logged in to see it).
* Has lots of round robins. I've never participated in them, but they have more than any other gardening site, as far as I am aware.
* Seed trading happens.
* You can list your website in your profile.

Cons:
* Has a bunch of bugs on my Kindle Fire HD 8 sixth edition with the Silk web browser. It's very difficult to edit stuff you've already written, because it deletes words after you click away from them. Also, if you take too long writing a post, you have to start over. Sometimes it'll bring back words in your post that you've deleted when you submit your post.
* The forum organization is hard for many people to navigate.
* The name of the forum you're looking for might not be intuitive. For instance, if you want the tomato forum, look for 'Growing Tomatoes'.
* If you want people to be able to PM you, you have to enable that feature.
* Email notifications for thread comments don't email you the full thing (it's truncated).
* Email notifications for PMs don't tell you what they said.
* It's kind of hard to find past PMs if there are no PMs in your recent notification list.
* Tagging people in posts is difficult to do properly.
* A lot of users are confused about how to use the site.
* The mobile app really isn't usable for regular Gardenweb use, but it's fine for participating in threads you've recently posted in.
* There's no dedicated watermelon forum.
* There's no dedicated sweet pepper forum.
* Quoting other users isn't super easy.
* There are neither mini-profiles nor signatures.

Neutral factors:
* It has a clean and simple professional look and feel. Nothing too overwhelming about the color scheme or fonts.
* Threads are not threaded. I consider this a con, but most forums these days aren't threaded.
* Avatars in threads are tiny.
* You can mask your username with a changeable name.
* Has Ideabooks (which are basically like personal posts that show up on your profile; they can be public or private, and you can invite people to them)
* The larger Houzz community is pretty commercial-oriented.
* Some forums can have a strong (and historically competitive) Q/A focus.
* Some people Tomato enthusiasts who used Gardenweb were disaffected with it (a while before Houzz took over), and started a new site called Tomatoville, which became very popular (Tomatoville is currently scheduled to go down, however).
* Advertising on Gardenweb used to be super annoying before Houzz took over.
* Page loads became faster after Houzz took over.
* When Houzz took over, lots of people complained, and more people left (but it seems to have been building back up). I think the navigation changes were probably the primary issue, but I could be wrong.